Social Network Use of Accounting Professionals in Accessing Professional Knowledge in Türkiye: The Case of Facebook

Abstract

Social networks, defined as virtual environments where people interact with other users using the internet, were first created for a group of university students to communicate with their schoolmates. Later, these networks were used for many different purposes, such as entertainment, news, advertising, product marketing and sales, education, and access to information on various topics. Professionals also create groups on these networks, share information with their colleagues in their field, and quickly access the information they need about their profession. Many people practicing accounting are also members of such groups on social networks. This study aims to examine the use of social networks by accounting professionals to access professional information. For this purpose, the groups actively used by accounting professionals were investigated using various keywords in social networks widely used worldwide and in Türkiye. After that, it was determined that the group with the most participants was on Facebook. This group was selected in the context of case study, one of one of the qualitative research techniques, and all the posts in this page were accepted as data. The web scraping method obtained 1,328 posts made in a specific time interval. These data were analyzed by content analysis method. In conclusion, it was confirmed that social networks were used by members of the accounting profession in order to access professional knowledge rather than social interaction.